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Barbie Zelizer, Ph.D.

Raymond Williams Professor of Communication

Director, Center for Media at Risk

Barbie Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Professor of Communication and Director of the Center for Media at Risk at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. A former journalist, Zelizer is known for her work on journalism, culture, memory and images, particularly in times of crisis. She has authored or edited fourteen books, including the award-winning About To Die: How News Images Move the Public (Oxford, 2010) and Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago, 1998), and over 150 articles, book chapters and essays. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Freedom Forum Center Research Fellowship, a Fellowship from Harvard University's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, a Fellowship from the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, a Fulbright Senior Scholar and a Fellowship from Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Zelizer is also a media critic, whose work has appeared in The Nation, PBS News Hour, CNN, The Huffington Post, Newsday, Liberation and other media organs. Coeditor of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism and former Director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication, she is a past President of the International Communication Association, where she is also a Fellow, and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association.

Now a Peabody Media Fellow, she is a recent Judge of the Peabody Awards for Excellence in Electronic Media. Her work has been translated into French, Korean, Turkish, Romanian, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and Portuguese. She is currently working on a manuscript How the Cold War Drives the News, for which she has been awarded an ACLS Fellowship for 2018-2019.

Barbie Zelizer's research focuses on the cultural dimensions of journalism, with a specific interest in journalistic authority, collective memory, and journalistic images in times of crisis and war. She also works on the impact of disciplinary knowledge on academic inquiry.